this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Not quite. 😉
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/office365-plans-and-pricing
E3 plan is the norm in more complicated workspaces now. Exchange, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Sharepoint are commonly used in such an environment, followed by Forms (HR department loves these and rightly so), Onedrive and PowerBI. Viva (formerly Yammer) makes waves now. Teams entered the market aggressively during Pandemics and it had evolved almost as fast as Android. It can now connect to great many deal of applications thus expanding the possible workflow and collaboration.
The ribbon being the productivity killer you're talking about is a non-existent issue, since typical office workers rarely venture further than the main set of icons + they have the most useful shortcuts pinned to the quick access toolbar.
In every environment where people have been using both pieces of software (MS Office and Star/Open/Apache/Libre), the former was preferred for its ease of use.
Again: Linux/FOSS movements tends to produce the mindset that is hard to convince that there's something wrong about anything it does, while listening to people's - common people, instead of experienced power users - complains, and following tested and appreciated standards should be preferred.
Having worked and working with many of these:
FOSS office products have been far superior to what's available on windows for at least a decade. There's certainly occasionally one or the other app on windows that may shine in one aspect or two, but overall the bloatware user experience on windows is killing productivity of anyone who knows how to operate a keyboard.
I'm sorry, dude, but now these are emotions talking through you, not actual valid points., especially since it's obvious that your knowledge about MS dates back to 2010, I assume? It had evolved. Massively. So much it became hard to compete with, even if you take the "money vs free model" argument into consideration.
You didn't like it, but the fact is that I am now sitting in a corpo office, part of a body spanning across countries and continents, where what you don't like and think bad, works well enough that nobody complains. It's very rich corpo. It can afford a legion of experienced Linux technicians and sysadmins, and yet it prefers to pay money, serious money for licences in subscription mode. Think about it for a moment - corpos squeeze money of everything. They are greedy, to the point that they wouldn't spare a cent to save a dying man. And yet they prefer to pay for MS.
Once again: Linux/FOSS needs to start to listen to what users actually want. Scornful "this is better, use this" won't do.
Until it changes, "20xx - the year of Linux". 😉
This is true. I value FOSS immensely. But it’s not for everyone. It’s not for the non tech. It’s not for the people failing to embrace change; and let’s be honest ms has always done file sharing best. They still do. Yes you have to pay the man. Buy good things cost money.
Same.
FOSS is crucial to the survival of freedom in IT (broad sense) - whoever claims otherwise, doesn't understand what is going on all around him.
But it doesn't mean that Linux/FOSS is allowed to stay blind and deaf and resist evolution, especially if it wants to become something more than a set of tools for network administrators...
I disagree. The part that you don't see is that people prefer to use Windows products because that's what they grew up with and they never used anything else. The majority of windows users only likes windows because posts like yours scare them away from even trying Linux. Windows is a catastrophic user experience and the majority of users put up with that because they think "that's normal".
Furthermore, there's a corporate ecosystem where useless and incompetent IT management gets supported by Microsoft products because the paid support takes most of the expert work out of their hands. So companies are feeding a bunch of microbrains in IT who don't actually do anything worth mentioning, except wasting their user's time with dumb questions before opening a ticket with microsoft.
I worked in environments where MS Office and Star/Open/Apache/Libre Office was used, and Tbird was installed in addition to whatever Windows email client. I'm not even discussing other pieces of software, these are enough to make a point, I think. There was hardly a person who prefered the alternatives. These tools were perceived as slow, unreliable, uncooperative and the lack of compatibility, document-wise, only strengthened these opinions.
As for "posts scaring people away..." Do you seriously think that whatever people write in the Internet is enough to convince big corps, governments and other massive groups of recipients? Come on...
I disagree with your take on corpo environment. If what you're saying would be true, then it'd be far more profitable for corpo to hire a bunch of Linux-oriented technicians and thus save costs of IT layer. But corpos don't do that. You're suggesting a paradox - a body that relies on cost-cutting and making everything as profitable as possible, that also is ok with wasting money on something that's allegedly easy to replace.
Again: you're doing what Linux/FOSS community usualy does. Instead of acknowledging the points and asking "what can be done to make this work", you're saying that your choice is better, good enough to work no matter what environment, what userbase is there, all consequences and the contradictory evidence be damned. It's users that need to change their ways, certainly not Linux/FOSS.
This might work as Apple's strategy, but it won't as hell work in case of Linux/FOSS. 😉
Hiring Linux professionals would require competent IT management. Most corporations don't have that.
And again: you're allowing for your emotions to dictate your opinion. This is wrong approach and indeed one of main reasons Linux/FOSS is hard to sell on. After all, would you really want to work with, and give your money to people who think yourself to be incompetent in spite of knowing you? 😉